Route planner
Fuel shortages & cheapest petrol
on your route
The only planner that shows fuel outages on your route
Plenty of tools can find cheap petrol near you. None of them answer the question that actually ruins road trips: will the servo I'm counting on have fuel when I get there? On remote legs — the Nullarbor, the Stuart Highway, outback Queensland — stations can be 200 km apart, and one dry bowser is the difference between a stop and a stranding.
PetrolPulse already runs Australia's live fuel shortage tracker, monitoring more than 8,000 stations through official government price feeds updated every 30 minutes. This planner plots those live shortage signals directly along your driving route — alongside the cheapest stations in each stretch — so you can plan fuel stops around both price and availability before you leave.
Prices come from the same state schemes that power the rest of PetrolPulse: real-time feeds in NSW, ACT, Queensland and South Australia, FuelWatch's committed next-day prices in WA, daily price caps in Victoria, and daily updates in the NT and Tasmania. No crowdsourcing, no stale app reports.
How to read the results
Green pins are your cheap options — the cheapest station in each segment of the route, with the overall cheapest highlighted in the result strip. Red pins are shortage signals: either the station itself reported a fuel as unavailable, or it stopped reporting a price for that fuel while its other fuels stayed current. We label those honestly as "possible" shortages with a last-updated time — treat them as a reason to call ahead, not a verdict.
Each station shows its distance off the route as a straight line. On a highway run, even a station 2–3 km off-route can cost more in time and fuel than it saves — the cheapest tank is usually the near-cheapest station that's actually on your way.
Common questions
How does PetrolPulse know a station might be out of fuel?
Two ways. Some stations explicitly report a fuel as unavailable through their state's official price feed — we show those as reported outages. For the rest, we flag a possible shortage when a station stops reporting a price for one fuel while its other fuels stay current. A possible shortage is a signal to call ahead, not proof the tanks are dry.
How far off the route does the planner look?
Stations within roughly 5 km of the driving route are considered, and each is labelled with its straight-line distance off the route. We deliberately show "off-route distance" rather than a detour estimate — the actual detour depends on where the exits are.
Which routes does it cover?
Any drivable A-to-B in Australia up to several thousand kilometres — Sydney to Melbourne, Adelaide to Perth across the Nullarbor, Adelaide to Darwin up the Stuart Highway, or your weekend trip. Prices come from every state and territory's official fuel price scheme.
Why doesn't it show every station on the route?
A long route can pass hundreds of stations, and a wall of pins helps nobody. The planner highlights the cheapest station in each stretch of the drive plus the cheapest overall, and overlays every reported or possible shortage. That's the decision you actually need: where to stop, and where not to rely on.
Written and reviewed by Mark Schreuder, founder of PetrolPulse · First published 17 July 2026